


Strange Things Done

by SeriousMistakes (TruckThat)



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: AU, Deathfic, Horror, The Cremation of Sam McGee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-24
Updated: 2012-06-24
Packaged: 2017-11-08 10:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/442277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/SeriousMistakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say a promise made is a debt unpaid... but this one's gonna be a bitch to see through.  Yamamoto and Gokudera go looking for gold, and instead find themselves in the middle of what isn't exactly a wilderness survival story.</p><p>["The Cremation of Sam McGee" AU - don't panic, though; it doesn't rhyme]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Things Done

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, you read that correctly: this is an AU based on Robert W. Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee." Why? God only knows. If you haven't read the original before, you should go read that instead of this; it's a pretty great poem AND an awesome campfire ghost story. Find the version illustrated by Ted Harrison if you can (Kids Can Press, 1986). 
> 
> Otherwise, all you really need to know about it is that suddenly, for the purposes of this fanfiction, Yamamoto and Gokudera are gold prospectors in the Canadian near-arctic in about December of 1907--and it's really effing cold out there.

They’re northbound and just coming up on the Dawson Trail when one of the sled dogs yips and then won’t quit limping. It's too early for it, but they're going to have to stop for the night. 

The light up here at this time of year starts to fade not too much past two o’clock, and even though it's early, long blue shadows are starting to creep out across the ground before Yamamoto is finished pitching their tent.  It takes a long-ass time to pound tent stakes into permafrost in the middle of December.  Well, that’s fine, Yamamoto doesn’t like to complain about a thing like that; he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t like a challenge in the great outdoors, right?  He’s had a lot of time since he came up North to practice believing this about himself.  Gokudera goes to take a look at the dog in the meantime—almost as soon as he picks her hind leg up, he swears viciously and lets it drop again.  “ _Fuck_.”

“Gokudera?  What’s up?”  Yamamoto unbends so he can see over the canvas to where the dogs are tied out.

“She’s cut.  Um.”  Gokudera is pulling his huge mittens back on, slumping a little.  “Pretty goddamn bad.  It’s all frozen up so it’s hard to tell, but I think it’s right to the bone.  Nothing we can fucking do about it, either.  We’ll have to...” He kicks at the snow.

“Yeah, I got it,” Yamamoto says, setting his jaw—and then resetting it into half a smile.  _Shit_.  “I’ll do it.  Sucks, though.”

“Yeah.  Ah, Jesus.” Gokudera scowls ferociously at the horizon like he expects all that ice and rock to scowl back.  “ _God_ it’s cold.  Why’s it always so fucking _cold_ out when shit like this happens?”

“Could be worse, partner.  It could be snowing!” 

They’ve both been out here a long time; Gokudera isn’t the only one who’s learned to hate the snow.

Yamamoto’s done worse things in his life than put a dog down, for sure.  He knows that Gokudera has, too, because the North makes everybody do terrible things sometimes just to survive—and because Gokudera is mostly prissiness laid over top of sharp edges as crusty as the snowpack, and patently unafraid to cut down anything that gets in his way.  Yamamoto sometimes gets this feeling, though, like all those defenses are protecting something a lot softer than what Gokudera wants to let on.  Or maybe it’s more like he has the opposite problem; like maybe Gokudera desperately wants to let on that he’s not quite _all_ sharp edges, and it’s just that no one ever taught him how. 

Anyway, weighing all the options, Yamamoto would rather shoot the dog himself.  She’s been about as good a dog as you could get, and this way at least he’ll get the chance to tell her so before he does what’s gotta be done.

Night in the tundra is setting in when he finishes, swallowing up even the possibility of summertime in other, unfrozen places the way it always seems to, and on top of everything else they’re also running low on tins of beans.  They’re already out of all the other tins.  Gokudera’s been griping about it for days—well, about that and the weather, but he’s always griping about the weather—but nobody actually makes the obvious, terrible suggestion about eating the dog.  It’s cannibalism to even _think_ it.  With only the two of them and the dogs out here it might as well be just them and the dogs alone in the entire world.  You hear about guys going crazy sometimes, like that.  So they eat canned beans in pork for the millionth meal in a row—“Hey, did you do something different? New recipe, right?” he jokes until Gokudera kicks him in the shin for his troubles—and then Yamamoto walks out into the dark a little ways and hacks out about as much of a hole as he can in the solid ground before he gives up and just buries her in the snow.

Back to huddling at their tiny fire, Yamamoto looks up at all the blackness out there and thinks that it’s beautiful, really.  Not safe or friendly and never kind, but beautiful in that way that’s so clean you can taste it.  Tonight the northern lights are close enough to feel, almost, like—

“Like _nothing_.”  Gokudera spits next to his boot and it hits the ground in a hard pebble, already frozen before it lands.  “No point in making up some fucking simile for it; there’s nothing to compare it to because no one should ever have to even _see_ this hell. Hell, bullshit, it’s not even that.  It’s too cold out here to be hell.”

Yamamoto watches sidelong while Gokudera stubs his cigarette out viciously, long fingers bare to the frost, and shoves his hand back into his mitt as fast as he can.  He tugs the hood of his parka back up over his face so that Gokudera can’t see him looking, though.  It’s damn cold tonight, it’s true—the kind of cold that stabs right through your coat to get into your guts.  Even the wolf fur trim on the parkas that isn’t supposed to freeze _ever_ is frosting up.

“Hey,” Yamamoto says, changing the subject.  “If you’re done with things out here, we should get in the tent.”

Gokudera gives him a steady, mistrusting stare, maybe suspecting Yamamoto of having some ulterior motive, but he slouches along after him easily enough.  Inside the canvas tent, outer layers peeled off but long johns mostly left on, Gokudera is the one who doesn’t unroll his sleeping bag, who slides into Yamamoto’s bag instead of his own.  Yamamoto hadn’t taken Gokudera to be much of a man for words when they’d first met, but he’ll bitch about the cold endlessly, all day long, and at night, as long as they’re touching, Gokudera _never shuts up_.




Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Gokudera has any sharp edges at all.

 

On Christmas day, without there even being a reason for it, Gokudera wakes up shaking.  He’s pale as a corpse and not warm enough at _all_ when Yamamoto presses his wrist to Gokudera’s forehead to check for fever.  Yamamoto stares into Gokudera’s terrified eyes for a long time in the half-dark tent before Gokudera swallows and says, “We’ve gotta keep moving. ‘S cold.”

“Right you are, partner,” Yamamoto laughs. “Wouldn’t be the North if it wasn’t cold.”

So they do.  By lunchtime, though, Gokudera is hunched up on the sled, not saying much in response to Yamamoto’s chatter.  He hasn’t said anything at all for a long time by the time Yamamoto calls it and makes camp again, and he doesn’t help out with the dogs today.  Yamamoto thinks about making dinner and a fire like usual, even cracks a re-used joke about _beans, again_ , but Gokudera won’t touch a bite of food and his own insides are still all full up with jagged icicles, too.  Instead, Yamamoto just rolls out the one sleeping bag they’ve been using and bundles them both into it.  He uses the other bag to spread over top, hoping to keep the heat in.  The whole time he works, he talks endlessly to Gokudera, stupid stuff and plain old bullying and then all the nicest things he can think of to say in an effort to straight-up shock him into responding, but Gokudera doesn’t talk back, just shivers.

The second sleeping bag doesn’t help, either—it’s colder lying next to Gokudera than it would be lying there alone, and there’s no heat to conserve.

Just when Yamamoto is sure that he’s asleep, Gokudera gives a miserable shudder and turns.  He wraps himself around Yamamoto’s front, clinging.  After a long time, he says, “Promise you won’t put me in the ground.  I’ll fucking freeze down there.  I don’t—I hate the cold and I’ll be cold forever, so just—promise you’ll burn me instead, okay.”

It isn’t a very funny joke, but Yamamoto manages a grin anyway.  “I thought it was your job to tell _me_ not to say stupid stuff.” 

“Yamamoto,” Gokudera growls, fingers digging in as hard as the permafrost under their bed, and it’s more life than he’s shown all day, “ _promise_.”

“Yeah,” Yamamoto tries pretty hard not to sound shaky, but Gokudera is shivering so violently now that it’s shaking them both.  _Jesus_.  He’s so, so cold everywhere that they’re touching.  “Yeah okay, geez, I promise.  You know I won’t let you freeze.”

“’Kay,” Gokudera mumbles, “’kay, good.”  Except Gokudera has never said anything was good in his _life_ and even his breathing against the side of Yamamoto’s neck is cold and shaking.  And then it’s only Gokudera’s breathing that’s shaking; all the rest of him is completely still, not shivering at all, just hanging on.  Yamamoto clings back as hard as he can, for as long as he can, and thank God, he doesn’t think that Gokudera ever notices that he’s started crying.

 

The next morning, they break camp long before dawn.  This is still the coldest part of the night, really, but they have to _move_ and it takes _forever_ while he wrestles with lashing Gokudera to the sled.  It’s so cold out now that every time Yamamoto blinks, his wet eyelashes freeze shut and he’s terrified he’ll have to drive the sled blind.

The only reason it takes so long—too long, probably, when they need to _go_ —is because the best way to pack Gokudera out would be flat, but he won’t lay flat at all.  When Yamamoto finally sets his teeth and just steps on him, Gokudera’s legs unbend in the middle with an ugly, sharp _crunch_ like rotten ice under the sled runner.  “There,” Yamamoto says to Gokudera.  The back of his mouth tastes like salt and bile, but he swallows and thinks, _good_.  There’s not enough left here to burn, but now they can get going; go somewhere else, someplace where he can start a fire big enough to do more than heat up endless cans of beans.

Yamamoto's eyes are dry now and the cold doesn’t matter quite so much.  All that matters is moving.

Gokudera is heavy, dead weight that Yamamoto knows he can ill afford with the food getting low and the dogs looking as skinny as they are—and they have to go faster.  He’s heavier dead than he ever seemed to be, alive, and when Yamamoto moves him from the sled to the camp or from the camp back to the sled, his legs now dangle hideously at the knees.  His boots scuff at Yamamoto’s legs when he carries him, but at all the wrong angles so that Yamamoto wants to scream at Gokudera _not to touch him_ , when he never, ever wanted that before. 

But even worse than that, he’s silent.  It’s not so bad in the daytime, with the noise of the dogs and the scrape and thud of the sledge on hard-frozen snow.  At night, though, when the dogs don’t howl, Yamamoto imagines he can hear the hiss of the northern lights burning cold.

“It’s like a forest fire,” he tells Gokudera after supper.  “If you could take fire and freeze it.  That’s what I was thinking of the other night, you know, before you bitched me out.”  He sighs.  “I know, I know, ‘we’re not out here to write a fucking poem,’ right?  Well, I’m no good with that kinda stuff anyway, I guess.  But you might be.  You’re smart enough for it, anyway, if you wanted to.”

Gokudera doesn’t reply, obviously, so Yamamoto whistles to himself to drown out the stillness.  The stillness is almost the worst thing, worse than all the ice and the dark combined.

The worst thing, though, the very worst thing, is that there’s nothing to cover Gokudera properly when they drive.  And Gokudera hates the cold _so much_.  And every day as Yamamoto re-ties Gokudera to the sledge, it’s not just the cold that makes his fingers numb and the ropes stiff that he has to fight with; while he does it, he always has to be _so careful_ not to let the hood of Gokudera’s parka slide back.

But it's always cold, cold, cold and Yamamoto's fingers are prone to fumbling, and so the hood slides back by mistake sometimes anyway.  It's clear, then, that what's on the sledge is not Gokudera.  It can't be, because Gokudera's dead, and Gokudera's legs don't hang at that broken angle, and the first time that Yamamoto sees what's taken his place he throws up—pork and beans steaming on the snow.  Some _thing_ has stolen Gokudera's parka, and it _grins_ about it.

A terrible, bloodless, triumphant rictus of a grin, smiling and smiling like Gokudera never would because he _hates_ the cold, until Yamamoto can get the thing’s face covered back up.

All the daylight hours pass in a headlong, horrified rush, running too fast over terrain that’s too rough for it and making too many stupid mistakes—trying to outrun the fact that there is absolutely no one behind Yamamoto, no one in front of him, probably no one for fifty miles—and the whole time Yamamoto is pushing exactly the _no one_ he’s trying to outrun ahead of him on the sledge.  All the night-time hours are just one long, frozen silence in which Yamamoto tries not to speak to anyone but the dogs.  But it’s hard to stay silent with Gokudera sitting right there, not talking.  Impossible to say whether it’s that silence or the creeping, scratching boredom of going day after day that keeps Yamamoto from sleeping at night.   Either way, he’s still grateful when he meets nobody else on the trail.  He feels half crazy already; he doesn’t need the look on anyone else’s face to confirm the opinion.

He misses Gokudera’s complaining, though.  Gokudera is always the first one to point out when he’s gone nuts.  And he loathes the thing on the sledge in a way that’s insane for sure, with a slimy, crawling loathing he didn’t even know he had in him.  Loathes the way it weighs more every day, an unbearable load of cold, dead clay that pulls at him until he feels like he can’t go another mile.  Like it’s dragging its frozen feet.  But none of it matters, because Yamamoto made a promise and now he’s honor bound to drag the both of them—Gokudera _and_ the thing—drag them along until his promise is fulfilled.

Every tree they pass is too stunted to bother with, so pitiful that Yamamoto feels too sorry for them to cut them down.  There aren’t even wolves out here anymore to howl back at the huskies, but the wind fills in and howls back louder every night.  He should probably go south and look for bigger trees.  Timber.  Something that burns.  Every morning, Yamamoto packs up his tent and heads north, north, north instead, until he runs right up on Lake Lebarge.

The lake is all frozen up in chunks, as if the water had frozen in perfect waves in the middle of a storm and then some giant fist had smashed down right in the middle, piling everything up on top of everything else so that those perfect waves didn’t matter at all.  Lodged mostly sideways against the near marge like a casualty of that same accident, is the hulk of a ship.  The “Alice May.”

Yamamoto and the dogs and the thing all come skidding to a stop just to stare. 

Gokudera would’ve called it ugly, or a waste of perfectly good scrap metal, and then kicked a hole in the rusty side just to see if it’d collapse.  But it’s shocking to see anything there at all when there’s been nothing, no men or buildings or even animals, in days and days.  Yamamoto feels like he’s forgotten that there _could_ be things.  Like he might be the one to collapse, instead of all that iron.

“Hey, partner,” he says, something suddenly occurring to him, “d’you think there’s still coal?”

The wind sighs a creaky, frozen sigh over the broken surface of the lake, disgusted with Yamamoto for forgetting that there's nothing to talk to.  But Yamamoto remembers now, and he unties the thing from the sled and hauls it with him, _scrape-scrape-scratch-thud_ over the snowy windrows, to go see.  He hopes all the scraping hurts, but it probably takes a lot more than a little bumping over the snow to put a dent in something frozen as solid as that.

The fire Yamamoto builds in the Alice May’s boiler, though—that should be enough to melt anything, even something as malevolent as that _thing_.  There’s enough coal left lying around to get a pretty decent blaze going, and then Yamamoto rips up a few of the cabin’s floorboards and chucks them into the furnace too, just for good measure.  He’s pretty sure that it’s a fire big enough to make even Gokudera at his very bitchiest stop complaining about the cold.  It roars so loud that no one could talk over it even if they wanted to, loud enough to drown out the wind and the dogs outside.  It’s perfect.

He heaves Gokudera in, parka and all, and slams the boiler door shut behind him.  The air in the cabin shimmers with heat even with it closed.

It’s nice to be able to feel his fingers again at last and he wants to stay, but the thing _sizzles_ when it burns, like thawing bacon.  Yamamoto’s stomach turns just to hear it.  Not to mention, now that he’s thought of it, he’s more than a little worried that the whole boiler is going to explode like an unopened tin heated over the campfire—he knows exactly what that’s like, too, because he’d done it once, not thinking, and the beans got all over Gokudera who hadn’t talked to him for _hours_.  A bad day on the trail.

Once he’s well outside, Yamamoto tries to turn his thoughts to staking the dogs out and setting up camp, same as always.  Reorganizing the sled’s packing, now that he doesn’t have to load himself down quite as much anymore; maybe planning his route back to Dawson City to reprovision.  But all he can think about is how half of the things on that sled are Gokudera’s, anyway, and should he, _could_ he, just leave those things behind, and how it seems impossible that anything that’d been so cold to start with could burn at all.  Maybe he should check.  He _has_ to check.

He goes trudging back into the cabin of the Alice May, apprehensive and unable to stay away.  The boiler looks the exactly the same as before from the outside.  Somehow, he was almost hoping for an explosion, or for some other catastrophic sign; he’d kind of expected one.

 _Well_ , Yamamoto thinks, _if he really was pork and beans, he’d be burnt up by now_.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Yamamoto grabs the handle—hot _hot hot hot oh my God_ on his freezing fingers—and wrenches the door open with a thunk.

Gokudera looks up at the sound of it, cool as can be.

“Come inside and close the door if you’re gonna stand there, fucker,” Gokudera says, sitting there cross-legged and with a smile a mile wide that Yamamoto’s never seen him wear before.  He’s actually _joking_.  It looks good on him.

**Author's Note:**

> ...
> 
> Thanks (I think?) to cahootsandotherthings for 1) not unfriending me when I said I’d stayed up all night and written this instead of hanging out with you and 2) betaing it anyway even though all I wanted to do was yell at you at 2 AM about my huge boner for Sam McGee and what a great game Yukon Trail was. I’m sorry about all kinds of stuff. But seriously, did anybody else play Yukon Trail? So great. Like Oregon Trail, but with more real-time boat building and somehow your life was even WORSE. “Welcome to Skagway!”
> 
> On the off chance that someone reads this and is like, ‘man, but there actually ARE trees along most of the Dawson Trail,’ I’d like to say... I KNOW, RIGHT?!?! Lake Laberge (or, you know, Lake Lebarge—but whatever, Robert Service) is totally in the boreal forest. Why didn’t Sam McGee’s buddy just cut some trees down and make a bonfire? It ain’t even tundra out there! This has bothered me since I was like, eight. So I moved the lake north. Wayyyy north. *shrugs* *goes back to playing Yukon Trail in my toque*


End file.
